Murder in the Museum

Chapter Forty-Four

Sheila Cartwright’s funeral duly took place, and was duly attended by all the Great and the Good of West Sussex. Lord Beniston recycled the bland appreciation that he had wheeled out for many similar occasions. Sheila’s close friend, the Chief Constable, also spoke. Tributes were paid to her enormous energy and achievements.

And Gina Locke was introduced to some very useful potential sponsors.

An overlooked figure, Sheila’s husband, was, needless to say, present at the ceremony and the reception that followed. He was so ineffectual a figure, however, that the other guests kept forgetting he was there.

But the one or two who did look at him by mistake, noticed on his face an expression that looked not unlike relief.

Laurence Hawker delivered his report well in time for the next meeting of the Bracketts Trustees. In the interim Gina Locke had organized replacements to fill the missing seats on the Board. (Josie Freeman had also tendered her resignation. This had nothing to do with recent events at Bracketts; it had been motivated solely by her masterplan for the social advancement of her husband. She had been offered a position on the Board of the Royal Opera House, where her presence would be much more valuable to his profile. A few more moves of that kind, continuing carefully targeted – and carefully leaked – philanthropy to the right charities, donations to the right political party, and Josie Freeman felt quietly confident of upgrading her husband’s OBE to a knighthood within a couple of years. The only other important thing she had to do was somehow stop him talking about car-parts all the time.)

Of course Gina Locke could not appoint new Trustees herself. But she could suggest suitable names to Lord Beniston, and he could invite them to join the Board. With little knowledge of anyone in West Sussex outside his own circle, and always liking to have his work done for him, the noble Lord had accepted all of Gina’s suggestions without argument. As a result the new Board had a much lower average age than its predecessor, and contained more members who saw the leisure industry exactly the same way as Gina Locke saw it. None of her apprenticeship under Sheila Cartwright had been wasted.

(In fact, approving the new Trustees was Lord Beni-ston’s last action for Bracketts. Confident that he had done his bit during the two years of his involvement, he resigned, quickly to join the board of another, rather more prestigious, heritage property. For him the change had three advantages: first, the patron of the new organization was a minor member of the Royal Family, so he was mixing with his own sort of people; second, it had been agreed that, so long as his name appeared on the letterhead, he wouldn’t have to attend any meetings; and third, he got free membership of the adjacent golf club.)

The reconstituted Board approved Laurence Hawker’s report and accepted Gina’s proposal that the research material should all be handed over to Professor Marla Teischbaum, who was to be given all cooperation in future with her biography of Esmond Chadleigh. (There was only one dissenting voice; unsurprisingly, it belonged to George Ferris.) The hope was that the book would be ready for publication to coincide with the centenary of Esmond’s birth in 2004.

As it turned out, that objective was achieved. The book made a great stir when it came out, was serialized in a Sunday newspaper, and sold in large quantities. Professor Marla Teischbaum became a media celebrity and on her frequent visits to England dished up her vigorous opinions on every available arts programme and chat-show.

And the evidence of his complicity in a major deception revived interest in Esmond Chadleigh.

Gina Locke’s pet project, the Bracketts Museum, funded by one exclusive donor, was also completed in time for the centenary. Though at first just a shrine to Esmond Chadleigh, within two years it had been made over and reopened. In homage to the writer’s new notoriety, it was then called ‘The Bracketts Museum of Fakes and Fraudsters’, and contained the largest collection of confidence tricks and scams this side of the Atlantic. (Graham Chadleigh-Bewes might have been obscurely gratified, had he known that there was a whole display devoted to ‘The Tichborne Claimant’.)

In its new incarnation the Museum did much better than it ever had before. At the beginning of the twenty-first century deviousness and cynicism were much more marketable commodities than faith and honesty.

Having turned around the fortunes of Bracketts, Gina Locke was headhunted for a senior job at the Arts Council, and settled down to a career of dispensing public money to the wrong causes.

Almost all of Esmond Chadleigh’s books went out of print. One exception was Vases of Dead Flowers. ‘Threnody for the Lost’ remained one of the nation’s favourite poems, though the notes that accompanied it in anthologies changed considerably.

The other surprising survivor of the Chadleigh oeuvre was The Demesnes of Eregonne. The book had become a minor cult in California amongst the members of an even more minor cult, who tried to live their lives according to its rather flaky principles. They self-published an edition of two hundred.

Jonny Tyson continued to work at Bracketts, and to keep the Weldisham garden just as his father had always kept it. His father died, but Jonny felt sure the same thing would never happen to his mother.

Mervyn Hunter continued his sentence in a secure prison. Jude continued to visit him and tried to give him confidence, tried to tell him he was no danger to anyone, and sometimes, briefly, Mervyn believed her. When he was released, he hoped to find work as a gardener. But he was also tempted to reoffend. He still felt safer in prison.

And Jude continued her intermittent sessions at Austen Prison. She continued to work harmoniously with Sandy Fairbarns, and neither of them ever knew anything about each other’s private life. Which suited both very well.

George Ferris started work on a new book. Its working title was: What The County Records Office Can Do For You.

And, of course, Laurence Hawker died. Working on the Bracketts report had only given him a brief remission from the inevitable. He lived less than three weeks after completing it.

Carole was shocked. Only very near the end had she realized how ill he was; and with that knowledge came the realization that Jude must have been aware of his condition for a much longer time. Carole was confused between sympathy for Jude and resentment of her neighbour’s secretiveness. She didn’t like the feeling that she had been the victim of a conspiracy of silence, a subject of clandestine discussion at Woodside Cottage.

Though inwardly anguished, the reaction to Laurence’s death that Jude presented to the world was one of serenity. Which confused Carole even more. They had been lovers, hadn’t they? Yet Jude didn’t behave as if she’d just lost the love of her life. Jude was very odd about relationships; and a lot of other things, come to that; around Jude nothing was ever cut and dried.

Secretly, Carole felt relieved that Laurence was no longer a fixture in Woodside Cottage. And guilty for feeling relieved.

To everyone’s surprise, Laurence Hawker turned out to have made elaborate plans for his own memorial service, which was to be a very traditional, religious one. Jude organized the event, in the London church he had specified, and there was rather an impressive turnout. Amongst a lot of spiky, combative-looking academics was a large number of women, many with beautiful Slavic cheekbones. Carole thought this was odd, but Jude didn’t mind at all.

And as a final irony, a typical post-modernist joke, Laurence Hawker included in the order of service a reading of Esmond Chadleigh’s ‘Threnody for the Lost’.

And almost everyone in the congregation mouthed the words and, yet to know any better, thought of the poet’s elder brother Graham, so tragically lost at Passchendaele.